A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition. Howard Boone's Zinn
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the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income workers and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, and the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law—all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
The Constitution became even more acceptable to the public at large after the first Congress, responding to criticism, passed a series of amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments seemed to make the new government a guardian of people’s liberties: to speak, to publish, to worship, to petition, to assemble, to be tried fairly, to be secure at home against official intrusion. It was, therefore, perfectly designed to build popular backing for the new government. What was not made clear—it was a time when the language of freedom was new and its reality untested—was the shakiness of anyone’s liberty when entrusted to a government of the rich and powerful.
Indeed, the same problem existed for the other provisions of the Constitution, such as the clause forbidding states to “impair the obligation of contract,” or that giving Congress the power to tax the people and to appropriate money. They all sound benign and neutral until one asks: Tax whom, for what? Appropriate what, for whom?
To protect everyone’s contracts seems like an act of fairness, of equal treatment, until one considers that contracts made between rich and poor, between employer and employee, landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, generally favor the more powerful of the two parties. Thus, to protect these contracts is to put the great power of the government, its laws, courts, sheriffs, police, on the side of the privileged—and to do it not, as in premodern times, as an exercise of brute force against the weak but as a matter of law.
The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights shows that quality of interest hiding behind innocence. Passed in 1791 by Congress, it provided that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.…” Yet, seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress passed a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech.
This was the Sedition Act of 1798, passed under John Adams’s administration, at a time when Irishmen and Frenchmen in the United States were looked on as dangerous revolutionaries because of the recent French Revolution and the Irish rebellions. The Sedition Act made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous and malicious” against the government, Congress, or the President, with intent to defame them, bring them into disrepute, or excite popular hatreds against them.
This act seemed to violate the First Amendment directly. Yet, it was enforced. Ten Americans were put in prison for utterances against the government, and every member of the Supreme Court between 1798 and 1800, sitting as an appellate judge, held it constitutional.
Despite the First Amendment, the British common law of “seditious libel” still ruled in America. This meant that while the government could not exercise “prior restraint”—that is, prevent an utterance or publication in advance—it could legally punish the speaker or writer afterward. Thus, Congress has a convenient legal basis for the laws it has enacted since that time, making certain kinds of speech a crime. And, since punishment after the fact is a strong deterrent to the exercise of free expression, the claim of “no prior restraint” itself is destroyed. This leaves the First Amendment much less than the stone wall of protection it seems at first glance.
Are the economic provisions in the Constitution enforced just as weakly? We have an instructive example almost immediately in Washington’s first administration, when Congress’s power to tax and appropriate money was immediately put to use by the secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton, believing that government must ally itself with the richest elements of society to make itself strong, proposed to Congress a series of laws, which it enacted, expressing this philosophy. The Bank of the United States was set up as a partnership between the government and certain banking interests. A tariff was passed to help the manufacturers. It was agreed to pay bondholders—most of the war bonds were now concentrated among a small group of wealthy people—the full value of their bonds. Tax laws were passed to raise money for this bond redemption.
One of these tax laws was the Whiskey Tax, which especially hurt small farmers who raised grain that they converted into whiskey and then sold. In 1794 the farmers of western Pennsylvania took up arms and rebelled against the collection of this tax. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton led the troops to put them down. We see then, in the first years of the Constitution, that some of its provisions—even those paraded most flamboyantly (like the First Amendment)—might be treated lightly. Others (like the power to tax) would be powerfully enforced.
Still, the mythology around the Founding Fathers persists. Were they wise and just men trying to achieve a balance of power? In fact, they did not want a balance, except one which kept things as they were, a balance among the dominant forces at that time. They certainly did not want an equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders, Indians and white.
As many as half the people were not even considered by the Founding Fathers. They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.
Exercises
1. How much colonial opposition was there to British rule in 1776?
2. What motivated the colonial poor to fight the British?
3. Zinn argues that the American Revolutionary “War was making the ruling elite more secure against internal trouble” (p. 62). What evidence does Zinn provide to support this assertion?
4. The Battle of Saratoga (1777) brought the French into the war on the side of the Americans. Why was this result significant enough to make the Battle of Saratoga the “turning point” of the war?
5. Which of the following is the most appropriate thesis for this chapter:
a. The Americans won the war only with help from the French.
b. The war was a struggle for power between members of an upper class.
c. Rich men ran the war.
d. General enthusiasm for the war was not strong.
Defend your choice and give your reasons for having eliminated the rest.
6. What were the grievances of the American troops who mutinied or rebelled during the American Revolution?
7. What were the methods of control used by the Revolutionary elite to control disobedient and rebellious colonists?
8. How did farmers resist impoverishment?
9. Why did the Indians fight with the British against the colonial rebels?
10. How did blacks respond to the opportunities presented by the Revolutionary War? How effective were their responses?
11. Why did the author of “All men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson, remain a slaveholder all his life?
12. The U.S. Constitution was: (Defend your choice with detail.)
a. “a work of genius put together by wise, humane men who created a legal framework for democracy and equality”
b. a work of genius put together by rich men to benefit their economic interests
c. a work of genius which balances the interests of slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property, and men with property
d. a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and monied interests of the North
e. all of the above
13. Who benefits most from a strong central government? How?
14. In the months preceding Shays’ Rebellion, what were the grievances of western Massachusetts farmers? What were the state government’s responses (both judicial and legislative) to the grievances of these farmers? What were the Boston merchants’ responses to Shays’